A Choir of Lies

by Alexandra Rowland

  “Because you do. Because you hold something in your hands that could be a weapon. Or a flower. Or a rope. Or a wall. You have something, and someone allegedly showed you how to use it, once.”

  Once. Yes. I knew how to use it—I knew how to bring a city or a nation to its knees. I knew how to betray the people who loved me best. I knew how to flee in the night with a country burning and dying in my wake. I’d been taught that very well. My master-Chant was a fine teacher in those regards.

  The objectionable thing was choices. We did terrible things. We made choices that weren’t ours to make. And Mistress Chant was right when she said that I was miserable with the choices I was making now. Before, when I was younger and following dutifully in my master’s footsteps, I could have claimed ignorance. I do claim ignorance for all that. I couldn’t have known what would happen—I was young. Sixteen or seventeen. I thought everyone’s intentions were as good and well-meaning as mine. And I’d never seen what stories could do, the way they could be like rust overtaking a metal tool, or like a trickle of water cutting through rock, or an invasive plant devouring the landscape before my eyes. My Chant made choices, ones that affected the lives of everyone for hundreds of miles in every direction, and the only person it benefited was him. And me, I suppose, but I wasn’t the one with my neck on the executioner’s block.

  I couldn’t have known, then. But now . . . Now I do know better, but once again, what right do I have to make choices for someone else? What right have I to say to Sterre that she doesn’t know her own business, or that what we’re doing is somehow hurting someone? We can’t know that for sure. We’re not responsible for how they spend their own money. If they want to spend seventy guilders apiece on stars-in-the-marsh roots, why should we stop them? Even if it’s a bad choice? Even if it means they go hungry for a few weeks? And how could we possibly know that it would? What does “ruin” even mean? Maybe it means something different to her than it does to me, and what right have I to tell her that her definition is wrong? Sterre is a smart person. She’s cautious and thoughtful. She’s blisteringly competent. She cares about people. She’d know, if things weren’t going the way they were supposed to. And I don’t think she’d ask me to do something if she knew it was going to hurt someone.

  “You don’t value your gifts at all, I think,” Mistress Chant said in a low voice. “You said yourself you have no plans to take even one apprentice. This suggests to me that you don’t think your knowledge is worth passing along. Am I right?”

  “No,” I said. “No. It’s worth it, but I—I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s not time yet! I’ll know when it’s time! I can’t just—” I bit off the rest of my sentence again: I can’t just stop doing this. Because I can. And I might. I buried my face in my hands. “You don’t have to attack me,” I said when I’d gotten my voice under control.

  “Attack you? Who’s attacking you? I’m offering you a chance to argue your points and defend your beliefs. It’s an opportunity, Chant.”

  The name made me flinch. Hard.

  “Are you all right?” she said suspiciously, after a beat of silence.

  “I’m fine.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “You twitch like a blueash smoker. Are you? You’re doing yourself no favors with filthy habits like that, not as a man and not as a Chant.”

  “It’s a good thing I’m not, then,” I said.195

  “You’ll end up in some decadent Araşti incense parlor if you’re not careful.”

  “I like Araşti incense parlors,” I said, just to be contrary. I’ve never actually been to one,196 but I’ve caught the heavy scents in the air sometimes when I’m walking in the foreign quarters of one city or another, or I’ve seen a narrow, dark little shop tucked in between two busier ones, colorful hangings draped across its windows and the characteristic orange-and-green tassel hanging from its doorknob.

  “Then you won’t mind it so much when you end up there,” she said.

  We bickered for a while longer, the conversation circling further and further down into resentment and anger, until we’d had enough of each other and I left.197

  * * *

  190. Fuck you. Seriously, really, truly this time: fuck you.

  191. Not so unaffected if I had known what you were planning on doing. This was mine; this was part of my heart, and you just took it and killed it and pinned it down like a dead butterfly.

  192. Too right. He likes music very well, but food is something deeper and more visceral for him. I’ve never known someone to enjoy food with the ferocity that he does.

  193. I’m going to nip this in the bud, because I know where you’re going with this. You’re going to say that I was mean to you, that I was scary and intimidating and hurt your feelings. I did nothing of the sort. You were getting snobbish and rude, asking me how I could manage two apprentices. Condescending. That’s the word I’m looking for. That’s what you were being.

  194. You didn’t say it, you snapped it.

  195. Snapped.

  196. Ah-hah!

  197. I . . . beg your fucking pardon? That’s it? You’ve left out all the important parts! You’ve left out all the parts where you explain, where you tell the truth, where you speak aloud of all the things that made you who you are. And that’s the problem, isn’t it? You’ll speak it, but you won’t write it down, because of that thing you said before, about how words on a page are terribly real. Oh, sure, you’ll linger over the trivial, soft, easy things like the singing bowl and the banquet in Inacha, but gods forbid you talk about anything real! That would be too hard, wouldn’t it? You’d have to be vulnerable. Really, truly vulnerable, not just this miserable self-pity. Ugh! Wretch! Coward! Do it right for once in your life, Chant—here. Here, I know. I’ll fucking do it for you, and then if I ever run into you again one day, I’ll shove these papers in your face so you can see how it’s done. Are you watching, Chant-in-the-future? Are you paying attention?

  THIRTY-ONE ½

  For the Benefit of Lazy Chants Who Were Abandoned by a Roadside Far Too Young

  And now that I’ve actually begun, Brother-Chant, I must be honest with myself: You’ll never read this. You’ve run away. My annotations thus far are all in vain—and this, too, is futile. Every “you” I write is a waste of ink.

  And yet, here we are. Here I am.

  So far in this miserable stack of pages, you’ve already committed several heresies and offenses, but possibly the worst of all is lacking the discipline to tell the story right. Lacking respect for your audience, even when you thought you were only telling this story to the wind.

  So this is addressed to you, but I have no choice but to admit that it’s for me. I’m the one who has to live with herself after this. I’m the one who will be lying awake at night and grinding her teeth about this gap you’ve left so cavalierly.

  So let’s just fix it, shall we? For the sake of me being able to get a good night’s sleep, if nothing else.

  A very long time ago and half the world away, by which I mean a few months ago, right outside the inn where I’m sitting and writing this, two Chants sat down together and told stories.

  The first Chant was older and wiser, and she had seen many marvels in the world, from the Mirrors of Zeva guarding the harbor of the Araşti capital, to the cliffs at the Straits of Kel-Badur and the Library of Anyaoh. All her stories were proper stories, tales of distant lands and wondrous things, memories and people and precious treasures.

  The second Chant was young—too young to be a Chant, really, certainly too young to be a Chant all on his own—and he had pointlessly huge eyes like a starving baby seal that somehow made the first Chant simultaneously want to punch him and pour a bowl of soup down his stupid gullet until he stopped looking like he thought someone was going to . . . well, like he thought someone was going to punch him, really. All his stories were the lies he was telling himself in every breath and every heartbeat.

  All right, no, enough of tha
t. Can’t keep it up, not for this, though it would have been funny.

  Ugh! This writing stories down thing is even stranger and more uncomfortable than I thought it would be. Unnatural, this is.

  Let’s try again, and let’s jump right to the relevant part. I don’t have time to ramble for pages and pages like you do, Brother-Chant, and the innkeeper only gave me a few spare sheets of paper when I asked.

  The relevant part, then. Yes.

  You kept—

  No, I don’t like that either. Doesn’t feel right.

  He kept twitching and flinching, one moment blushing scarlet with shame or anger, and the next staring at me with those big blue baby-seal eyes, helpless and hopeless, like I was holding his true love for ransom. Like I had some kind of answer to the greatest question of the universe and I was about to destroy it.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” I said. I thought about pushing him, about telling him, Of course you’re not all right, I can see you’re not all right; pull yourself together and tell me what the fuck is wrong.

  “I don’t like fighting.”

  “We’re not fighting; we’re arguing.” He twitched again, like I’d pinched him, and looked wretched. Well, more wretched. “What’s the matter? Why do you keep doing that?”

  I watched him struggle to find words, perhaps even to decide whether to speak at all. “It’s nothing. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  I threw up my hands. “What is the point of this? Why do we keep failing so miserably at having a conversation? I’m here, I’m talking, I’m trying to meet you somewhere in the middle, and you . . . There’s something wrong with you. Something seriously wrong with you, and it isn’t just the willingness to sell out to Sterre de Waeyer, or the lack of discipline, or the obvious inexperience and refusal to take responsibility. You claim to be a Chant, and you can barely talk to me. How can you be a Chant if you can’t feel your way blind through a conversation? You ought to be able to do it as instinctively as breathing, or like one of the decorative automatons the Vintish king has in the palaces at Montcy and Ancoux.” He cringed into himself with every word I spoke, and it only made me more and more irritated, until finally I snapped, “Didn’t your so-called master teach you anything?”

  Then, then he looked up at me with some fire in his eyes. Less starving baby seal, more starving young wolf caught in a hunter’s trap. Finally, I thought. Finally. “He taught me enough,” he said.

  The boy didn’t like to fight, he said, but he was angry about something and he was doing a damn good job of repressing it. But all you need is one spark to build a bonfire. I cupped that spark of his between my fingers and blew on it. “I doubt it,” I said, letting all my contempt come through. “I’ve seen no evidence of that yet. He didn’t teach you shit. But you knew that. You must have known that, if you decided to strike out on your own so early.”

  He drew himself up, then, his spine stiff and prim and proper. “I didn’t strike out on my own,” he said. He was pale now, but his eyes were flashing. “And I don’t want to talk about him.”

  “Any Chant worth his salt would have seen that you weren’t ready to go it alone yet.” I was goading him, drawing him out. Plain as day, everything had something to do with that master of his. That was the one thing I’d found that got him properly mad.

  He tossed his hair out of his eyes and gave an artfully careless shrug that did nothing at all to convince me. “He thought that I was. It’s been a year and a half that I’ve been alone now.”

  Now . . . That gave me a bit of a turn. “How old are you, boy?” I demanded.

  “Nineteen or twenty.”

  “He set you loose when you were eighteen?”

  “Roughly. Yes,” he said stiffly. “Nearly nineteen, I’d guess. Hard to keep track when you’re traveling.”

  “By the gods of the summits, why so young?”

  He shrugged.

  “No,” I said. “None of that. I mean it. Tell me why. What did he say?”

  “Why would he have said anything?”

  “Because sinking your homeland beneath the waves is a pretty big project. It’s a time commitment. You were from Hrefnesholt, weren’t you? Forget half the world away, that’s three-quarters of the world away. When did the two of you decide to turn back that direction? When did you arrive? How long did you stay before you made the choice? And in all those days, weeks, months together, heading back, what were the reasons he gave you?”

  “It wasn’t like that,” he said. “It was quicker than that.”

  Terribly suspicious. “Quicker in what way? Surely you talked about it.”

  “No, not really. He decided I was ready, and then we did the rites and that was all. Then we parted.”

  “But that’s not right,” I said. He responded with another infuriating shrug. “You have to go home, you have to think it over, and then you do the rites. No—tell me exactly what happened.”

  “We were walking along one day, and we came across an old abandoned farm. It looked like it was going to rain, so we slept in what was left of the barn. In the morning, Chant said he was tired, so I went out to scrounge for food, and he stayed in the barn by himself. I came back in the afternoon, and he asked if I was still carrying my homeland with me. I had a rock in my bag, you see. I’d brought it from Hrefnesholt when I first left with him, because I knew he’d ask me to give it up one day and I wanted to be ready. He told me once that wasn’t how it worked, when he found out about the rock. He said then that we were going to go home, that he’d take me back and do the rites there. But in the barn, he asked if I had the rock. And I said yes, and he said, ‘All right, let’s go outside and get it over with.’ ” His voice wavered just a touch here. “So I followed him outside, and did the rites and sank my homeland like he told me to, and then it was over.”

  I was aghast. “And you were fine with that?”

  “I did what he asked me,” he said.

  “But you should have had a choice. You should have been able to say, “ ‘No, Chant, I’m not ready. Let’s keep going a little longer.’ ” And, listen, I might object to everything about you, but you deserved better for your rites than a rock tossed into—what was it? A mucky millpond?”

  He was quiet. He swallowed. “No,” he said, trying valiantly to maintain that stiff, prim tone that sounded so wrong on him. “It wasn’t a millpond. It was a trough.”

  “A what?”

  “A trough. Like for horses.” He paused, then added as if each word were being wrenched from him by some geas of truth, “Or pigs. More likely pigs, I think.”

  The sorts of things that come out of your mouth when you’ve been trained to keep asking questions even when you’re shocked and horrified . . . “Why do you say that’s more likely?” I asked, because that was the only thought that could fit in a sentence small enough to get out of my mouth.

  “It was lower to the ground. Made of wood.” He wasn’t looking at me anymore. “Old wood. Mostly rotted away, actually. More of the idea of a trough that had once stood there. The legs on one end had fallen off, so it was lying crooked. On a slope, see. But it held the rain from the night before. Some of it. A few inches of it.” His voice had dropped to a whisper, and I was too horrified to stop him talking. He gave a shaky laugh. “It was kind of green, actually. Algae. And there were mosquito larvae in it. Little tiny twitchy things. Chant told me what to do and say, and then I dropped my rock in the trough and that was it. I told you he didn’t stand much on ceremony.”

  “I remember. You did say that, yes,” I said blankly.

  “I was—upset. I was upset, so I went to bed early, and when I woke up in the morning, he was gone. I thought he’d just gone for a walk. I waited all day, and then I slept again and he still wasn’t there in the morning, and that’s when I realized he wasn’t coming back at all, and that I . . .” His voice cracked and he swallowed hard. “I was going to tip the trough over and get my rock back so I’d have that, at least, so I’d have something pre
cious with me, but I—I thought it would be wrong. I threw it away. That was the point, right? You do the rites to prove you’re willing to give up something, just like the ancient Chants did when they lost Arthwend to the sea. And I did. I gave it up, and I could have taken it back, but I didn’t. I just left my homeland there in scummy, smelly water in a rotting pig trough, and I walked away. And that was a year and a half ago. And that’s what happened.”

  “But why would he do that?” I asked, still too stunned to be angry. “Why would he leave you like that?”

  “I don’t really know,” he said, with an obvious, regrettable, and failed attempt to sound airy. “We were fighting. He was tired of me. I didn’t trust him anymore. I kept crying all the time.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, it’s a long story, but the short version is that a bit more than a year before he abandoned me, he incited a civil war, wrecked a country’s economy, and then sold out said country to save his own neck. He got a lot of people killed or ruined in the process, and just as a final straw he faked his own death, sort of, but not dead-dead, just dead in the mind, and he didn’t tell me any of it. He tricked me into carrying messages for him, and he went behind my back, and then at the end, he sat there in front of me pretending to have lost all his wits and his soul, and I wept in front of him, and I took care of him: I fed him soup and cleaned him and changed his clothes and told him how much I missed him. I grieved in front of him for days, and the whole time he never once even hinted that he was still alive in there, because—because he needed me to be lost. That’s what he said. Because I’m not a good liar, he thought, and he didn’t think I could keep a secret or act convincingly.”

  “What the fuck,” I said. “What the fuck.”

  “I know it’s stupid!” he cried. The tears that had been standing in his eyes spilled over. “I know it’s stupid of me to care this much after it’s been so long, and I know he did it wrong. I know it was my fault too, just as much! I should have—I should have—”